James Baldwin once said that the protest novel, far from being upsetting, was a comfort to U.S. society, and something of the same applies to Farrakhan: adversarial, menacing in tone, as if in telepathic communication with a black rage that he can harness or unleash as easily as turning on a faucet. Whites like to think there is someone in control of the taps of emotion, but Farrakhan also confirms the image of the black as separate, not a part of things, not to be trusted. The moment when a civil rights figure could be elected to high office has perhaps passed. Colin Powell’s military career would have solved a problem almost without bringing it up. His institutional background was reassuring, a promise that he represented something larger than the special interests of blacks, as if civil rights or economic aid were not concerns for whites.
Malcolm X told Coretta Scott King that he was so militant because he wanted the government to think that the only alternative to him was dealing with a moderate-seeming man like King. But Farrakhan has no intention of sacrificing himself so that someone else can be influential. He was quick to put President Clinton’s speech on race relations earlier that afternoon in Texas into his Million Man March address. He treated Clinton’s remarks as an attempt to negotiate with him in some way, a sign of the weakness of the civil rights movement that he is able to exploit. When Ben Chavis was executive director of the NAACP, having defeated Jackson for the post, he was criticized when he invited Farrakhan to a symposium of black leaders. Perhaps Chavis included Farrakhan because of his popularity among the young. When a sex scandal later forced Chavis to resign, he landed in Farrakhan’s camp. James Forman doubted that Farrakhan could have organized the Million Man March without Chavis’s connections. The logistics would have been beyond his expertise. Now Farrakhan can do himself what the big civil rights groups used to do.
The most disturbing thing Farrakhan said all day came at the end of his speech, disguised as a benevolent idea. He said the mainstream groups hadn’t supported him. “So what?” He said he didn’t need to be in any mainstream. The mainstream was sitting in boardrooms, out of touch with reality, he said, even though most black groups are grassroots in structure. “I don’t need you to validate me. My people have validated me.” He proposed setting up an economic development fund with the money raised from the March and from future marches. Maybe its board, he said, would be composed of the leadership onstage with him. One of the things the fund could do would be to “free” the Urban League and the NAACP. He could imagine, he said, going to Myrlie Evers-Williams, the executive director of the NAACP, and asking what was the NAACP’s budget for that year. “Thirteen million? Fifteen million? Write her a check.” Then, he said, the NAACP would be accountable to the board of his economic development fund.
Farrakhan was suggesting that he buy out and buy off the black organization that has been most prominent in the history of desegregation, an organization that, because of its prestige, however battered lately, has blocked his way by remaining critical, opposed, unconvinced. Blocked his way to what? So much of what Farrakhan has to say is not only about black America’s plight but about his status in the mainstream he affects to despise and to find so irrelevant. He comes from that old-fashioned world where race politics represented one of the few career opportunities open to blacks. But his is also a generation that still thinks there can be only one hand at the faucets of emotion. Blacks used to have a nickname for Booker T. Washington, who very much saw himself, and was seen by whites, as the mediator between North and South, black and white, the one who went to the White House and reported back: HNIC, Head Nigger in Charge. Perhaps that was why when Farrakhan repeated that he—and God—deserved credit for the March, he was expressing an insecurity as much as he was gloating.
In every issue Farrakhan sees a Farrakhan-shaped hole. He said he hadn’t come to Washington to tear the country down. The country was tearing itself down. Derrick Bell, who attended the March but was not among the speechmakers, said he disagreed with those who objected to the March because it seemed like little more than an imitation of the conservative ideology called family values. He said he hoped that the Christian Right did not have a monopoly on such things. Blacks are not necessarily society’s natural liberals, contrary to stubborn fears and even more persistent expectations, but Farrakhan’s ambition to create yet another religious political force also draws attention away from the secular civil rights movement. Farrakhan and black conservatives agree on what they see as the corruption to black souls in looking to government for solutions to their problems. That the atonement Farrakhan offered turned out to be along the guidelines of moral choice and community responsibility is very agreeable to whites in a political climate hostile to affirmative action and the like. Thurgood Marshall as a litigator was more of a threat to the status quo than Farrakhan will ever be, because Marshall could win in the courts. Perhaps that was why Marshall dismissed one of Clarence Thomas’s heroes, Malcolm X, as little more than talk.
The morning after the March I went back to the Capitol. There were a few men here and there taking last photographs of themselves at the monuments that had been coated with people the day before. Traces of straws, gum wrappers, cigarette butts, and plastic rings from bottles glinted in the grass. People had collected the garbage into heaps, but the wind had blown it around during the night. A fifty-nine-year-old black groundskeeper said he thought the March was uplifting, but he was reluctant to say too much because he worked for those people “up on the Hill.” He went back to his rake. All through the thirteen-hour shower of sweeping phrases about self-reliance I’d kept thinking that there has never been a time in U.S. history when blacks did not depend on self-help. As Du Bois once said to Booker T., blacks have had self-help for ages, and what he wanted to know was, what had it done for them so far. Between the Natural History Museum and the Smithsonian Castle seagulls scavenged where all those men had stood.
1995
These days, Message to the Blackman in America is available through Amazon.
BUSTED IN NEW YORK
How long had it been since I’d been out late on the Lower East Side? Back in the New Wave bohemian days of the late 1970s and early ’80s, the Lower East Side was the capital of mischief. The low life was still literary. I could be persuaded to go anywhere in search of an authentic urban experience. But then my friends grew up, and I moved far away, as Europe seemed to me at the time. Because I don’t drink and run wild anymore, because I now live down a dirt track in the English countryside, a Manhattan room of the young and the smooth can be intimidating.
But the reggae club the summer before last was known as a chill lounge. Rona let her hair hang over the beat. We were waiting for Billie. I was telling myself not to have a hard time waiting. I was looking forward to my session with that inner-child finder, marijuana. The reggae swelled around me. My head bobbed like a duck when there’s bread on the water. I saw what looked like a ballet dancer’s leg. Billie, and a Billie who knew the score. Her opening drink would not take long. We were going to step outside. We couldn’t smoke pot in this reggae club. Not even in a reggae club? That’s how long it had been since I’d been out late on the Lower East Side.
Streetlamps threw a spotlight over pedestrians crossing Second Avenue. Killer taxis left unpleasant gusts. I leaned into the summer heat. Soon we three were alone in the dark of Sixth Street. Rona checked behind her. Then, like backup singers on the downbeat, Billie and I snapped glances over our right shoulders. Maybe some people wouldn’t have bothered, but we were pros. We were veterans of the streets. Rona fired one up and passed it. We were chatting. I hogged it. We were drifting toward midnight. Billie handed it back to Rona. Three shapes in front of a doorway decided to heckle us. “You’re having a good time.” They sounded like unappetizing old kids. We moved to the curb. “We know what you’re doing.” Rona pushed her hand against the air to let them know that the joke, whatever it was, had to stop. “Smoke it.” We shook our heads at their being so boisterous when they were maybe getting hig
h themselves, and in a doorway, of all places. We should have looked ahead instead of behind.
We saw the corner, and we saw the big man in white-guy plaid shorts cutting a pigeon-toed diagonal from across the street. Everything about him was aimed toward us. His bright white sneakers continued to rise and fall in our direction. A huge meatpacking arm was held out to us, and a big voice was coming at us, too. His other arm came out of his undershirt with a square of ID. We had to keep moving toward him, like something swirling down a drain. There now seemed to be enough light for a film crew’s night shoot. How could we have missed the blue unmarked van parked on the other side of Sixth Street?
“Been smoking something?” No answer. “Put your hands flat on the trunk of this car.” The women, my friends, were side by side at the back of the car. I was on the sidewalk and had to bend over. Other undercovers quickly appeared. “We’re going to empty your pockets.” A woman had taken up position behind Rona and Billie. I felt a hand go into my pocket. My total financial assets held by a faded money clip hit the trunk of the car. “Did you all just meet tonight?” a new voice demanded. “No.” My own voice was thin and completely lacking in the authority of outrage. The money clip was followed by a pack of menthol cigarettes, a disposable lighter, a case containing reading glasses, a John Coltrane–Johnny Hartman CD—“You listen to some good music,” a head of hair said—and a mobile phone. “Where’s your beeper?” He patted me down. “You got a beeper?” “No,” came the thin reply.
The detectives murmured. They’d found the smallest stub of weed in a matchbook in Rona’s pockets. The woman detective left. The detective with the hair asked the ladies to step over to the sidewalk. Where Plaid Shorts had, like me, the beginnings of his father’s stomach, this one had pecs and biceps flowing out of a magenta tank top. He looked like a television actor in the role of maverick cop. The rest of him was in the suburban version of casual: crisp blue jeans and clean sneakers.
“So you guys just met tonight?” Tank Top asked. It was my turn. He was going to compare answers. Plaid Shorts said he was going over to check something. “How do you know each other?” Tank Top demanded. “School.” If he identified us as middle class, wouldn’t he have to watch himself? Maybe I was trying to prick some white blue-collar resentment, anything to turn the tables a little. When he asked about my beeper, I thought maybe he hoped he’d interrupted something good, criminally speaking, such as a black dude giving two white chicks a taste of the street herb they were about to buy or get ripped off for. But if he saw that we were okay, then the paperwork on the citation that they gave out in these cases would speed up. One black guy with gray in his beard and one and a half white girls, not two, because by that time they must have figured out that Billie’s honey skin and the Asian cast to her eyes and her Church of England accent were some weird Caribbean story. Yes, officer, I wanted to explain, the one with the henna highlights is a famous Jewish scientist, the daughter of the British Commonwealth is a banker, and I’m a black guy who needs two pairs of glasses and won’t be on your computer lists, not even a credit rating.
Billie and Rona had shown no emotion until Plaid Shorts brought the handcuffs. They gave out soft, pastel exclamations. Plaid Shorts led them, affronted and vulnerable, across the street to the side door of the van. I thought, Rona’s daughter walks just like her. I felt my watch being removed. Tank Top put my arms behind me and pushed my hands high up my back. I felt the metal around my wrists. I thought of my parents and how they would hurl themselves into this situation if they found out. I felt and heard the handcuffs lock. I thought of my parents and their lawsuits. Back in the good old days, they’d sued our hometown police department to force it to desegregate, and when that worked, they sued the fire department—things they did in their spare time, as good citizens, as blacks of their generation, members of the NAACP rank and file. Injustice had only to ring their doorbell, and they were off to the poorhouse. And here was frivolous me letting a white man put me in handcuffs for something other than protest. I remembered what my father had said to my tears at my sister’s memorial the year before: keep it together.
But I was in shock. “I’m going to be sick.” I was starting to list from side to side. “Have you been drinking?” “No.” I was going deaf. “I’m going to pass out.” Tank Top gripped me just below my right armpit, and we started off, but my feet waited before they followed my legs. The world broke into silent, colorful particles. I got to the door and fell flat into the van. Rona’s face floated. I began to hear her. I concentrated on finding her face in one place, something I could get up for and move toward, even if only on my knees. “Don’t hurt him,” Rona and Billie called. “I’m trying to help him,” Tank Top countered.
Keep it together, I chanted to myself. Not because I was a black man in handcuffs in front of two white guys; not because I was powerless, which made it all the more necessary at least to imitate the examples of dignity in confrontations with police I’d witnessed; and not because I was a grown man losing it in front of two women who, though in handcuffs, were trying to defend me. But because they were my friends. They were the ones with children at home. I crawled over to my friends in the seatless, windowless rear of the van, dripping sweat on them.
Plaid Shorts yanked the van into the street. Because we couldn’t grab, and there was nothing to grab on to, we rolled into Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole positions and rolled again when Plaid Shorts hit the gas. “This is such bullshit,” Billie said to the ceiling. “This sucks,” Plaid Shorts said. But he wasn’t talking to us. He looked across to Tank Top. “You got that right.” “A big one,” Plaid Shorts added. “Hate it,” Tank Top said to his window. “Total bullshit.” Rona had dusted off her repertoire of apt facial expressions. This one said, “Are these guys for real?” “Five more years, man, and then I’m out,” Plaid Shorts said. “I can’t wait to just do my band.” He did a near wheelie around the corner. We shouldered back up into sitting positions pretty expertly after two corners. Tank Top took some gum from the dashboard and said he had to keep at this bullshit until he could pay off his wife. He told Plaid Shorts that instead of alimony he was offering his wife a once-in-a-lifetime, can’t-refuse lump sum. “It’s like a buyout.”
The acid-driven power chords of Pink Floyd took over the van. Rona’s expression said, “These guys are too much.” “They’re wild,” Billie’s eyes said as she looked for the place behind her where the music was blaring from. Maybe the detectives were trying to tell us something. Not that they were nice guys who, regrettably, had to do their job but that they were better than the job they’d been reduced to doing, and that they, too, had aspirations. The Rolling Stones came on next, and Plaid Shorts sang along. The music was perhaps meant to say that they weren’t uncool, redneck cops having a blast at the expense of the liberal, the black, and the in-between.
I was too ashamed to be sympathetic. Being addressed as “sir” by Tank Top only after I had shown weakness and fear—that was humiliating. A cop could go off at any time. I’d thought of that and been afraid, and there was no way to take it back. And for what had I lost my self-respect? For an offense the detectives thought beneath their training. What did you do last night? Oh, I was picked up for a reefer, and I fainted like a man. The van went up one street and down another. We couldn’t see much, but most likely we were driving around and around as various undercover operations didn’t work out. On one dark corner we waited so long in the van by ourselves that we almost slept.
The van door slid open, and in the shaft of light Tank Top was helping a Hispanic woman, maybe in her fifties, climb aboard the bummer bus. “Hey, officer,” she said when we were underway. “My hands too hot.” The detective parked and helped Rona and Billie out. Tank Top said, “I’m going to loosen these tight cuffs, like you asked.” Then he turned off the lights, slammed the door, and left me with this woman who made unsavory sounds in the dark. I thought she was trying to ditch her vials of crack, and the detectives would then claim that they we
re mine. I went over on my side, practicing my I-was-asleep defense. They put Rona and Billie back in the van, turned on the lights, drove off, stopped again, and got out by themselves. As soon as the doors closed, the Hispanic woman, who’d freed her hands, whipped out a big bag of heroin, snorted it on her knee, and deftly worked her hands back into the cuffs. Rona was laughing in disbelief. Quietly, the Hispanic woman zoned sideways. The detectives, when they got back in, firmly looked straight ahead.
The next time the van door opened, a Hispanic man, maybe also in his fifties, climbed in. A dark Rasta youth was pushed in after him. “Ooh,” the Hispanic guy said, and he tried to shift himself. He nodded greetings of solidarity. What he’d been oohing about hit Rona’s hygiene radar first. It made delicate Billie draw in her legs. The gleaming Rasta youth sprawled before us had matted dreadlocks that looked like what comes from the back of a furnace when its filter is changed. Maybe I should have thought harder about this being someone’s son, but the stench was overpowering. Meanwhile, he kept up a stream of Babylon raasclaat denunciations of the police. He shouted curses on the white man. I thought, Rasta, my brother in Garvey, you are on your own. The detectives paid him no mind. They’d made their quota for the shift.
We’d been smoking a joint right around the corner from the local precinct house—that’s how hip we were. The detectives took us inside, and the handcuffs came off. After three hours, it was a relief to see my fingers. Tank Top took me and the Rasta youth upstairs to a grotty corridor, and the strip search began. He made the Rasta youth wait in the shadows at the end. He ordered me to hand him my clothes item by item. I was to turn around, bend over, and drop my shorts. He said quickly that that was enough. I was to take off my socks and turn them inside out. “Get dressed.” He asked if I’d ever been arrested. No. He said he would try to tell me what was going to happen. I thought I understood. He motioned to the Rasta and sent me downstairs. He and the Rasta followed moments later. Tank Top had returned my property, except for the phone and the CD. Such stuff had to go over to the lockup at Central, he explained. If that was the case, then the Rasta youth had a prayer shawl and a Torah for Central to deal with. Tank Top tried to talk when he took my fingerprints. “So, what kind of things do you write?” After that, he had paperwork to finish. Now and then he would dial a telephone number, mutter, hang up, and shrug. A clock kept vigil over a wall of “Most Wanted” leaflets.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 5